Volume 39, Number 15 · September 24, 1992
On the Edge
By Hilary Mantel
Alma
by Gordon Burn
Houghton Mifflin, 210 pp., $19.95
This is a novel that operates at the interface of reality and dream. Its subjects are show-biz stardom and serial killing. In real life—whatever that may be—its central character died in 1966, but in Gordon Burn's narrative she lives on into the present day. Yet Alma Cogan was a 'personality,' a creation of the media: in a sense she never really existed at all, except as a construct, a confabulation, 'a work of conscious and total artifice.'
Review, 2727 words
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